What are your favorite dimmer switches?

I’ve tried a few dimmer switches for room lights from Inovelli and GM and have been fairly disappointed with them so far. One of the Inovelli ones in particular just outright broke, but with all models of each brand they have issues detecting clicks. When I press them and hear a click they don’t always actually register it and act on it, which has been really annoying, especially if I’m carrying something. Also one of the Inovelli models wouldn’t let me configure it via Z-Wave which made it a bit more hassle since I had to look through the instructions to decipher their various tricks to modify its settings. After all this experimenting to find the ideal switches & dimmers, I’m kind of at a loss as to what I should try next.

What switches or dimmers do you all recommend? If it’s relevant, I’m in the US.

I have three Innovelli Red dimmers and they work great. They are very responsive to taps and I have all kinds of notifications set up with them.

But, notifications currently dont work only because I switched to ZWaveJS which doesn’t support setting Zwave parameters yet. Should be fixed soon. They worked great under OZW.

I also have a HomeSeer and a GE switch. Older models. I have not tried in a long time, but I know the HomeSeer switches do scenes well. The GE ones I think had some weird work arounds for some reason. I also used to have a lot of states being out of sync on the GE switches, especially after a manual switch operation. I moved these to areas that are pretty much only controlled by my Google Homes now and we pretty much never actually use those particular switches.

I have a few z-wave GE switches and I like the Inovelli switches. I feel like the thing that let’s the Inovelli switches down is just the current state of z-wave in Home Assistant. These manufacturers are much more current on the tech than what HA can support, making it a pain to configure devices.

HA needs to get it’s z-wave house in order. If that is zwave js or whatever, fine, but so many people have been stuck on the current/old integration waiting for a somewhat feature complete z-wave upgrade with migration.

I’m very surprised to hear of any issues related to the Inovelli hardware. They have been ROCK solid for me since 2019, and the one that had a slight issue (the air gap wasn’t removing power from the load) they replaced in a heartbeat.

Post up over at community.inovelli.com and we’d be happy to help. I’m a regular over there and will look for your post. The staff is very active there as well.

Inovelli really is unmatched at this time in my opinion.

Agreed with others that Z-wave reliability is being vastly improved on HA and we are in the middle of a major transformation right now. In a few weeks it’s going to be a different ballgame for everyone relying on Z-wave in HA.

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@LogicLemur - sorry to hear about the issues with your switch. If you haven’t already, shoot us a ticket (or just PM me) and we’ll get it replaced.

As far as the various tricks to get it up and running, one thing I’ve been meaning to do is get a rock solid instructions page setup. @kreene1987, I’ve been meaning to reach out to you, @petro as well others to really lock this down as I know it’s something that is out of date in our setup instructions.

Especially moving to the latest ZWaveJS.

Anyway, again, @LogicLemur apologies for the hardware issues. I hate seeing that and please let me know how I can help.

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